President Donald Trump, and the MAGA movement more broadly, have made two priorities very clear: They want fewer immigrants in America and more babies born to American mothers.
Those goals, however, are at odds. Millions of parents in the United States, native- and foreign-born alike, rely on immigrants to take care of their kids. (My toddler son has only ever been cared for by immigrant women, myself among them.) Immigrants make up at least 21 percent of the child-care workforce—and this may be an undercount. When fewer immigrants are in the American workforce, economic research suggests, women may work less or have fewer babies—possibly both.
In the first half of this year, Trump’s ICE agency made twice as many arrests as it did under the Biden administration during the same period last year. These efforts seem to have created a chilling effect, making many female immigrants scared to show up for work. According to a report from the New America Foundation published earlier this month, the arrests were associated with a loss of about 39,000 foreign-born child-care workers. Meanwhile, 77,000 U.S.-born mothers of kids under 5 dropped out of the workforce.
The study’s conclusion echoes past research by other scholars. A 2024 study found that Secure Communities, an Obama-administration program that led to hundreds of thousands of deportations, reduced the total number of day-care employees, in part by sparking fear among even documented immigrant workers. “Even if they are a legal immigrant,” Jessica Brown, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina’s business school and an author of the study, told me, “they may have family members who are not.” Brown estimates that during the Secure Communities era, 16,000 fewer people were working in child care and 1,700 fewer day cares were open than would have been otherwise. Brown theorized that lower-paid immigrant workers leaving the sector might have required child-care centers to bring in more higher-wage, native-born employees—“but maybe that’s not sustainable,” she said, “and so your center just closes instead.”
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These reductions in the child-care workforce had a big impact on mothers, who are typically the parent to step in when a nanny or day care isn’t available. A study by Chloe East, an economist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and her co-authors found that Secure Communities was associated with mothers of young children becoming about 1 percent less likely to work—a small-seeming but significant decrease, when considering the 24 million working mothers in the U.S. East said she believes that this was because affordable child care became less available, given that a similar decrease was not seen among women without children or among fathers, who tend not to be the primary caregivers for young children.
Some researchers anticipate that the Trump administration’s ICE operations will affect immigrant child-care workers even more than Secure Communities did. “When we see ICE all over a city for a week, when we see them go to an apartment complex and try to knock on every single door,” East said, “that is a really new phenomenon at the scale that we’re seeing.” The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, estimated that if Trump succeeds in his goal of deporting 4 million people, employment in the child-care sector would shrink by about 15 percent, which would almost certainly make continuing to work more difficult for many mothers.
Perhaps this is what the MAGA movement wants: for American women to quit their jobs to stay at home with their kids. Several prominent MAGA figures, including Vice President J. D.Vance, have suggested parents do just that. But setting aside the fact that most mothers say they don’t want to do this, and that many working families cannot get by on only one income, making child care less available might not inspire working women to stay home. It could push them to have fewer kids.
The relationship between affordable child care and fertility is fuzzy; many countries with subsidized day care and other benefits for parents nevertheless have low birth rates. But some data suggest that as child care gets more expensive or less available, women have fewer kids. A recent working paper by Abigail Dow, an economics Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, found that higher child-care costs lead to lower birth rates and delay when mothers have their first child. When the price of child care for children under 3 increased by 10 percent, the birth rate of women ages 20 to 44 decreased by 5.7 percent.
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Research has shown that after immigration restrictions loosened in the 1960s and the immigrant population grew, the price of child care decreased relative to what it likely would have cost otherwise. That seems to have led to more educated women having kids: A one percentage-point increase in immigrants to a given metro area was associated with a 0.3-percentage-point increase in the probability of highly educated women having had a child in the previous year. According to Delia Furtado, an economist at the University of Connecticut and the author of that study, these mothers might have been responding not only to the cost of child care but also to its convenience and quality.
If the president and his supporters see the tension between anti-immigration policy and pronatalist efforts, they haven’t acknowledged it publicly. MAGA world may talk about both issues a great deal, but deportations almost always win out. Immigration was one of the most important issues to Trump voters in 2024; pronatalism is much less popular as an issue, and the majority of Republicans say the government should have no role in encouraging people to have more kids. In a speech to Congress this year, Trump used the word border 21 times and the word children just 10. Joshua C. Wilson, a political scientist at the University of Denver who studies the conservative movement, told me, “Immigration is the lead-off issue that gets the attention of the base.” Pronatalism, by contrast, is “multiple rows behind.”
The authors of Project 2025 call “open-borders activism” a type of “cheap grace,” which they define as “publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience.” By this definition, MAGA’s pronatalist rhetoric can also be considered cheap grace: a way for the president and his administration to throw red meat to social conservatives without needing to adjust their anti-immigration stance—or to pay up for parental leave or subsidized child care. In his first public address as vice president, Vance said it should be “easier to raise a family” in America. His administration’s immigration policies could make doing so much harder.
The post MAGA’s Immigration and Pronatalist Goals Are at Odds appeared first on The Atlantic.
